Web site usage via browsers is regularly tracked and analyzed by commercially available web analytics services, which gather detailed data about web page usage, and to some extent about particular web site users. Entities which provide other entities with web analytics services are referred to as “analytics providers”. One leading web analytics provider is Omniture, Inc., of Orem, Utah, the owner of the present invention. Omniture provides web analytics technology under its well-known mark SiteCatalyst™. All other marks used herein are property of their respective owners.
At present web analytics data are typically collected from server logs or using web-beacons. Web-beacons are small image requests placed in a web page to cause communication between the user's device and a server. The server may be controlled by the analytics provider, by the vendor whose website contains the web-beacons, or by another party. Web-beacons are also known as clear GIFs, web bugs, image requests, or pixel tags. Web-beacons can be used for advertising, behavioral targeting, and other processes, to gather information a visits to websites. Web-beacons are commonly used by analytics providers to gather analytics data.
Web analytics data is more useful when it is presented in a manner that answers pertinent business questions. Toward that end, Omniture has provided various tools and services which filter, visualize, organize, and otherwise help manage raw analytics data in order to help Omniture clients and partners improve their web sites and services.
In particular, Omniture has commercially provided a report builder program and a compatible but separate checkpoint editor program. The user operated these programs generally as follows. The user launched the builder, and in a separate window launched the checkpoint editor. In the checkpoint editor, the user defined a plurality of checkpoints which correspond to web pages a visitor might visit in a web site. When the user had made all desired additions, deletions, or other changes to the checkpoint definitions, the user pressed a button indicating that a batch of checkpoints was ready for processing. In response, the report builder ran. The report builder imported the checkpoint definitions, accessed analytics data gathered about visits to the web site, created a report based on the checkpoints and the analytics data, and then displayed the report. One type of report, known as a “fallout report”, shows for each checkpoint how many visitors left the path defined by the checkpoints. Fallout reporting is an example of “path analysis”, the study of paths taken by web site visitors.
The user could change the checkpoints, e.g., by adding another checkpoint to the defined sequence, or by removing one of the checkpoints. In order to obtain an updated report after editing the checkpoints, the user ran the report builder again. The report builder built a new report, based on the new checkpoints and the web analytics data. This new report was built from scratch. That is, given the same checkpoints and the same analytics data (and the same report builder software), the report will be built in the same way each time regardless of any overlap between the new checkpoints for which the report is being built and any previous sequence of checkpoints. In other words, the report builder has no “memory” of its previous work, so it duplicates some report building work when some of the checkpoint pairs are unchanged.
Other concepts related to the present invention may be known, or become apparent through sources other than this background, including without limitation the references being made of record in connection with the present patent application.